It might not be Perl, but from what you're mentioning about wasting resources, you might want to look at Alan Sussman's work on P2PGrid ... I saw the 2006 presentation, and he was working on having the programs register what resources they need (so they'd be assigned to appropriate machines ... so you didn't waste the machines w/ 32GB of RAM on something that only needed CPU time, not memory)

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other